Training & Performance
The Exercise Is Not the Expertise
The exercise is only the visible part.
A player comes to me before training and says:
“My left quad feels a bit strange. Is there something I can do to make it feel better?”
There is probably no single exercise that is automatically right just because the athlete says their quad feels strange. Before I choose anything, I want to understand a little more.
Where exactly is it?
What does it feel like?
When do you notice it?
Is anything actually limited?
How long has it been there?
Is it getting better, worse or staying the same?
Have you felt something similar before?
I am not asking because I expect those questions to reveal one perfect answer. Most of the time they will not. What I want is enough information to form a useful idea of what might make sense next.
Maybe I want a small eccentric exposure. Maybe a simple single-leg knee extension makes sense. Maybe I want something faster because I am more interested in how she responds to producing force than in giving her another slow exercise.
Maybe the best decision is not to add anything. The exercise comes afterwards. That distinction has become increasingly important to me.
The exercise is downstream of the problem
We talk a lot about exercise selection.
Which squat variation is better?
Which hamstring exercise should we use?
What is the best drill for this injury?
What should we do for acceleration?
Those can all be useful questions. But they can also start too far downstream. Before I care about the exercise, I want some idea of what I am actually trying to change.
And even then, I rarely think I have identified the problem with complete certainty. Take somebody whose squat has stopped improving. Maybe they struggle to produce enough force out of the bottom.
Maybe their trunk or back becomes the limiting factor. Maybe there is no obvious weak position at all and the absolute loading required to keep progressing the same lift is simply creating more fatigue than I want for what we are getting back. Those interpretations lead to different decisions.
Maybe unilateral work gives us a way to keep challenging the legs with less absolute loading. Maybe eccentric or isometric work lets us spend more time around a position I think is limiting them. Maybe a pin, box or partial variation changes the problem in a useful way.
Maybe additional posterior-chain or trunk work deserves more attention. But none of those exercises is automatically the answer. They only make sense in relation to what I think is happening.
The exercise is not the starting point.
It is one consequence of the reasoning before it.
Most decisions are working hypotheses
I do not usually know with certainty that I have identified exactly what an athlete needs. I have some ground beneath me. Their training history.
What I have seen. What they tell me. How they have responded before.
The demands of their sport. What we have already tried. What is coming next.
Sometimes objective information helps too. Then I make a decision. But I still see that decision as something provisional.
A working hypothesis. If the athlete responds roughly the way I expected, that gives me more confidence in the idea. If they do not, I should be willing to reconsider it.
That is why I am less convinced by the picture of the expert coach identifying the problem and then selecting the correct tool from a toolbox. It sounds cleaner than coaching usually is. A lot of the time I am doing something less certain and more practical.
I understand the situation as well as I can. I choose something that makes sense. Then I watch.
The response tells me whether my original interpretation was useful.
The exercise can also be a question
Go back to the player with the quad. Imagine I give her a few controlled eccentric repetitions. She says it feels noticeably better afterwards.
Useful. That does not suddenly prove exactly what the problem was. But it tells me something.
Maybe it feels no different. Also useful. Maybe it feels better while we are standing there, but once the warm-up progresses she becomes uncomfortable accelerating.
That is different information again. The exercise is trying to do something. But sometimes it is also asking something.
How do you respond to this?
I think that is particularly useful in rehabilitation, where I am often exposing the person and the tissue to slightly different stresses while trying to understand what they tolerate. A different range changes the question. A different position changes it.
Speed changes it. Contraction type changes it. A unilateral task can ask something different from a bilateral one.
The intervention gives the athlete an exposure. The response gives me another piece of information. Then I decide what to do with it.
Sometimes the answer is to change nothing
This is also why I probably keep programmes stable longer than some coaches expect. There is a period where the athlete is still learning the work. They are learning the setup.
They are finding the right loads. They are learning what the intended effort feels like. They may still need a lot of feedback.
Then eventually the movement becomes familiar. They understand what I want. They know roughly where their load should be.
The exercise itself stops consuming so much attention. They can actually start training through it. And I think we sometimes change the programme almost exactly at that point.
Six weeks have passed. New block. New exercise.
Start learning again. I am not convinced that time passing is enough of a reason by itself. If the athlete is progressing, tolerating the work and giving me no convincing reason to change it, I am comfortable leaving it alone.
Sometimes progression is keeping exactly the same exposure for another week because the athlete is finally responding well to it.
That can look like I have done nothing. To me, it is still a decision.
Stability gives the coach something to learn from
There is another reason I value stability. It does not only help the athlete adapt. It helps me understand them.
A reasonably stable programme gives me a reference. I start seeing patterns. This athlete tolerates this amount of volume well.
This exercise creates more soreness than I expected. They handle this frequency easily. This exposure seems to cost more than it gives us.
They usually need a few sessions with something new before the movement starts looking good. The information becomes useful because enough of the environment stays familiar. If I change the exercise, volume, range of motion, contraction type, frequency and weekly structure at the same time, the athlete may still respond.
But I have made it much harder to understand what they responded to. There will always be uncertainty. I do not need to create more of it unnecessarily.
Novelty is useful when it remains interpretable
None of this means I want training to stay the same forever. I like variation. Sometimes it lets us expose the athlete to something they are currently missing.
Sometimes it changes the cost of getting a similar stimulus. Sometimes it addresses a limitation we have started to see more clearly. Sometimes learning something new is useful in itself.
An athlete who has become extremely comfortable with one task may engage differently when they are given a new coordination problem. There can be value in that. But I like novelty around something stable.
I think of it almost like a small experiment. Keep enough constant that the response means something. Introduce a change for a reason.
See what happens. Then decide whether that change deserves to stay.
Novelty is useful. Noise is not.
Variation should buy us something
I still like this way of thinking about exercise variation:
I want it to buy us something. Maybe I am trying to address a weak position. Maybe I want useful loading with a lower overall fatigue cost.
Maybe I want a different tissue stress. Maybe we need more exposure to a particular range. Maybe I want the athlete to learn a new skill.
Maybe the previous route still works, but something else deserves more attention for a while. There are plenty of good reasons to change something.
“Week eight has arrived” is not a particularly interesting one.
Neither is:
“We need to keep things fresh.”
Freshness can matter. Boredom is real. An athlete who has mentally checked out from the work is part of the context too.
But I still want some idea of what I expect the change to give us. Otherwise variation starts becoming something we do to make the programme look coached.
New things have a cost
Change is not free either. The athlete may temporarily use less load. They may be less efficient.
The movement can require more attention. A new stimulus might create more soreness than something they have been doing for months. For a while, today's performance can look worse.
I am comfortable accepting some of that when I think the new work gives us something useful. That does not mean I think athletes need to get worse before they can get better. I would not make that absolute.
It just means that learning and unfamiliarity have a cost. Sometimes the athlete needs to train a little easier while they learn the new task. Sometimes the new exposure is slightly more than they are accustomed to and we accept a little more soreness or fatigue while they adapt.
Neither is automatically a problem. Neither is automatically useful either. I still have to look at what happens afterwards.
A few sessions may tell me quite a lot. Sometimes I want a few weeks. I do not have a fixed timeline.
I want enough time to distinguish:
this is unfamiliar
from:
this is not giving us what we wanted.
Something can stay without staying in focus
I also do not think programming has to be binary. An exercise does not have to be either in or out. It can stay while its role changes.
Maybe we spend a period really pushing a strength exercise. Later it remains in the programme, but at a lower dose or frequency while something else becomes the priority. Maybe unilateral strength gets more attention.
Maybe eccentric work. Maybe isometrics. Maybe explosiveness.
Maybe reactive work. The original quality has not suddenly stopped mattering. We have simply moved the scales.
That is much closer to how I think about long-term physical preparation. We are rarely working on one thing and then abandoning it completely for something else. The structure evolves.
The emphasis changes.
Sometimes changing something is easier than trusting it
I think there is another reason coaches change programmes. We want our work to be visible. If an athlete is paying for coaching and receives an exercise they already know, it can feel uncomfortable.
If this week's programme resembles last week's, did I actually do anything?
If another physiotherapist knows the same knee-extension variation, where is my expertise?
If another S&C coach also uses squats, split squats, jumps and sprints, what makes my work different?
It can be tempting to answer that by making the programme more distinctive. More exercises. More variation.
More complexity. Something the athlete has never seen before. Now the coaching looks obvious because the programme looks coached.
I do not think that is where the value sits. A squat is not mine. An isometric is not mine.
A sprint is not mine. Three sets of five certainly are not mine. Two coaches can prescribe exactly the same exercise with exactly the same sets and reps.
The reasoning behind it can still be completely different. And even sophisticated reasoning is not valuable simply because it sounds sophisticated. It becomes useful when it helps us make a good next decision and learn from the result.
The decision is not the end
This is probably the part I would add to how I used to think about the phrase:
The exercise is not the expertise. The decision is. I still agree with it. But the decision itself is not the end of the process.
I can make a very intelligent-sounding decision and still be wrong. What matters is whether I pay attention afterwards.
Did the athlete respond as expected?
Did the exercise give us what I thought it would?
What did it cost?
Did something else change?
Do I still think the same thing about the problem now that I have seen the response?
Good coaching cannot only be about making decisions. It also has to involve being willing to update them. That is where the programme stops being a prescription I have to defend and becomes something I can continue learning from.
Enough understanding to make the next useful decision
I do not think I need perfect certainty before I act. If I waited until I understood every variable completely, I would spend a lot of time doing nothing. Most of the time I want something more practical.
Enough understanding to make the next useful decision. Enough clarity to explain that decision to the athlete. Enough stability that I can learn from what happens.
And enough willingness to change direction when the response gives me a reason to. That matters particularly when I am working with symptoms. I do not need to pretend I know exactly why the athlete's quad feels strange in order to make a sensible next choice.
I can say:
We are going to try this.
This is why.
Tell me what happens. Then we reassess. That is very different from guessing randomly.
It is also very different from pretending certainty I do not have.
Guidance with clarity
This connects closely to how I want the athlete to experience coaching. They do not need the entire reasoning tree in my head. They need enough of it to understand the next step.
We are keeping this because it is still working. We are changing this because something else deserves more attention now. We are trying this variation because I want to see how you respond to a different stress.
We are going lighter because learning this properly matters more than forcing your old numbers onto it. We are leaving this out today because the expected return is not worth the cost. That is enough.
The athlete gets a clear direction. I keep paying attention to the complexity behind it.
The exercise is only the visible part
I still enjoy exercises. I enjoy programming. I enjoy solving the puzzle of how different pieces might fit together.
But I do not think the value of coaching is in knowing the largest number of exercises. Most of us have access to essentially the same ones. What you cannot see on the programme is everything around them.
What do I think the athlete needs?
Why do I think that?
What are they already getting elsewhere?
What will this choice cost?
What am I expecting to happen?
What actually happened?
And does that response change what I think we should do next?
Sometimes the answer is a new exercise. Sometimes it is the old exercise for another four weeks. Sometimes the thing I thought was the problem turns out not to matter very much at all.
That is fine.
The programme does not have to prove that I was right. It should help me understand the athlete better.
The exercise is not the expertise.
It is only the visible part.
What matters is the thinking that brought us there, and everything we are willing to learn afterwards.